The order of merging operations for queries in inverted file systems

Abstract

In inverted file systems, queries can be written as Boolean expressions of inverted attributes. In response to a query, the system accesses address lists associated with the attributes in the query, merges them, and selects those records that satisfy the search logic. In this paper we consider the minimization of the CPU time needed for the merging operation. The time can possibly be reduced by taking address lists that occur in several product terms as a common factor of these products. This means that the union operation must be performed before the intersection operation. We present formulas which can be used to decide whether the above method is advantageous. The time can also be reduced by choosing the order of intersection operations so that it takes into consideration the occurrences of the address lists in the products and the lengths of the address lists. For choosing the order of intersection operations we give a heuristic algorithm that minimizes the total time needed for intersections.